There is no sport that reveres the past more than baseball does, and not because it lives in the past -- not at this time, when there is probably more young talent in the game than ever before.

Baseball fans, more than any others we have, understand that the past provides context, and even proportion, to what we are seeing now, as we let the kids play, and watch them play. So it is worth noting today that nobody ever played more like a kid than Willie Mays, and no player in history was more fun to watch play than he was.

He turns 88 today. He’s still the greatest all-around player who ever lived, and not just because it’s his birthday.

He played his first game in the big leagues in 1951, for the New York Giants. He hit the last of his 660 home runs while playing for the New York Mets in 1973. So you obviously have to be of a certain age to have even seen Willie Mays with your own eyes on a ballfield.

But Willie Mays isn’t just another Hall of Famer out of the past, out of the magic of the 1950s in New York City, when Mickey Mantle was young and played center field for the Yankees, when Willie was young and playing the same position at the Polo Grounds. Willie Mays is somebody -- and something -- that you have to pass on.

To properly understand who Junior Griffey was when he came along two decades after Mays had stopped playing, to understand who Mike Trout is and what high praise it is for him to be compared, you have to first understand Willie Mays, whether you ever did see him with your own eyes or not.

Mays played the prime of his career at a wind tunnel called Candlestick Park in San Francisco. He only played in three World Series in his career -- one with the New York Giants, one with the San Francisco Giants, and finally one with the New York Mets in ’73. He was 42 years old by then, and that Series is remembered as well for Mays misplaying a couple of fly balls that he once would have put in his back pocket as anything else.

 “They saw me old and forgot what I was like when I was young,” Mays told me one day at Spring Training with the Mets a few years after he had retired.

He didn’t say it with regret, somebody who would have been the Michael Jordan of his day or the Tiger Woods if he had played his entire career in New York the way Mantle did. He just stated a fact.

For too many fans, the last thing they saw from Mays was the thing they remembered all too well, and did forget what it was like when he did not have to try too hard to play the game with flair and a dazzling array of skills, at the plate and on the bases and throwing the ball -- and maybe chasing down balls in center field most of all. He didn’t have to try too hard to play the game with flair, because he made the game look easy. Like child’s play.

 Ray Sadecki, a pitcher who was once Mays’ teammate with the Giants, once said this about him:

 “The game was invented for Willie Mays 100 years ago.”

This is what Leo Durocher, Mays’ first manager in the big leagues, wrote about Willie Mays in his autobiography, “Nice Guys Finish Last”:

“If somebody came up and hit .450, stole 100 bases, and performed a miracle in the field every day, I'd still look you right in the eye and tell you that Willie was better. He could do the five things you have to do to be a superstar: hit, hit with power, run, throw and field. And he had the other magic ingredient that turns a superstar into a super Superstar. Charisma.”

There was a time in American sports when the highest possible praise you could lavish on somebody was this: He had some Willie Mays in him. Mays hit as high as .347. He hit as many as 52 home runs in a season. The year he turned 40, in 1971, pitchers still walked him 112 times and Mays still managed to steal 23 bases. He ended up with a lifetime batting average of .302. He had 1,903 career RBIs. He finished with 3,283 hits. And who knows what his career home run total would have been if he hadn’t played his prime at Candlestick, where he must have thought there were whole seasons when the wind was blowing in, along with the fog?

 “I bet I lost 200 home runs playing in that base,” Willie Mays himself once said.

Mays still hit 660. Of his contemporaries, only the great Henry Aaron hit more than that.

Mays chased balls down in the outfield, and his cap flew off and then he would come up throwing, the way he did when he made what is still the most famous October catch in history, willing to run all the way out of upper Manhattan to chase down a ball Vic Wertz hit in the 1954 World Series. And after he did run that ball down, seemingly running the length of a football field with his back to home plate, of course he wheeled and came up throwing.

You want to know who Willie Mays was, and what he was like on a ballfield in those days? Go online today and simply type in these words: “Willie Mays. The catch.” Sixty-five years later, that is still how it is known: The Catch.

He was, and is, The Ballplayer. The Say Hey Kid. Pass it on.